Friday bullets, April 7, 2017

The day seemed to start off well enough, but then I had the nerve to plan an actual art project. The horror! I thought my arts and crafts loving children would be thrilled at the prospect of an art project, especially since they have been pretty infrequent around here recently. We are evidently out of practice, or the general anxious tone of the house regarding the move does not allow for much creativity, either way, let's just say it was a train wreck from start to finish and leave it at that.

Let's talk about other things instead.

• I don't have news about the move. I wish I had news about the move. It could be in the next couple of days I might have news about the move. But I don't have any news right now. I wish someone would let a cat into my head and have it just kill that particular hamster, because I'm kind of done with his constant wheel running.
• I don't even get to escape when I'm asleep. I normally sleep exceedingly well. I have yet to have a night when I haven't woken up in the middle of the night, and when I do sleep I have strings and strings of classic (and unpleasant) stress dreams. 
• I think my general stress is communicating itself to my children. Stressed children, even if it is secondary stress are unpleasant.
• To show my complete lack of emotional margin, I burst into tears when I accidentally cracked one of the little quail eggs when I was turning it a few days ago. Yes, I am a quail murderer.
• On the subject of eggs, when we were at the Museum of Science of Industry last week, we first went to see if they had any eggs hatching. They did! We stood for a long time and watched two chicks actually hatch out of their eggs. It was very cool.
• We also saw a cool new Omnimax movie at the museum called Think Big, about engineers and the things they design and build. Some children found it entertaining enough, but K. loved it. He came up to me afterwards to say how cool the movie was. I was reminded several times afterwards how much he enjoyed it. Of course, this is also the child who builds city scapes with blocks, draws city sidelines, can name some of the more important Chicago skyscrapers, and comes up with new car ideas all the time. Here are a couple of his most recent car drawings... done freehand.

• Having J. gone for 13 hours a day kind of stinks. Just sayin'
• Because of the news about the house I don't have for you, we have temporarily put all house-stuff on hold and gone back to a more normal schedule. This was good. Normal is good, for almost everyone. R. had quite a bit of difficulty, though, because this also meant that much more parental energy and attention was directed back at her. If I am busy, it is so easy for her to just quietly float around the edges of things, sitting and staring. If I notice, I'll try to redirect her, but if I am frantically working to get things done, I don't always. The past week has been a week of Mom noticing, and it is tiring to have to actual be focused and present for several hours at a time. As she worked on using those brain cells again, it got better as the week progressed, but there were some hard moments during the week.
• Y. has written two books about a little girl who didn't know God and then her parents told her. Much processing is going on in that head.
• Y. has also really blossomed in her reading as well as G. and L. Yesterday I got to hear (for a third time) about Pig Wig and the ham. I love that story. It makes me laugh every time.
• The downside to all of this hurtling closer to having nearly everyone be a reader is that the picture books have become less and less important to everyone. I'm not really sure I am quite ready for a phase of parenting that does not involve stacks of picture books. I'll keep them out for now, but I offered to switch from the winter to the spring books the other day and everyone was kind of, 'Meh.' At some point R. will be ready for them, but not for a while yet. She is heavily into the board books we have for her.
• Stress seems to cause people in my family to desire pets. Some of my older children keep showing me pictures of dogs that need homes. It seems incredibly foolish to add a new pet at this particular point, which I tell them. But the pictures still come. And then I have to look at the really cute Great Dane puppy pictures. And the rescue huskies. And dozens of other really cute and deserving dogs. If my children had their way, the animal population would far outweigh the people population.

Let's stop there a call it a week, shall we? I'm ready to.